When I heard about all those unidentified objects flying around New Jersey last week, I did what any enterprising journalist would do:

I headed to Grovers Mill.

That was the site of the last major panic about flying saucers here in Jersey.

Sparking that panic was a radio show called "War of the Worlds," narrated by the great actor/director Orson Welles. It was broadcast the night before Halloween in 1938.

It was entirely a piece of fiction. But it was good drama. Check this line from one actor claiming to have witnessed the landing of a Martian spaceship:

"Good heavens, something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here's another and another one and another one! They look like tentacles to me. I can see the thing's body now. It's large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful!"

In the days before TV, there was no easy way to check the veracity of such a statement - except of course the telephone.

But that merely permitted the listeners to spread panic as they called friends who were equally frightened by the thought of those spaceships landing in that farm field in what was then rural Mercer County.

It's now the gateway to Princeton University. Although I'd driven past the signs for Grover's Mill hundreds of times, I never stopped to take a look around.

When I did, I encountered a pleasant park on a lake. I found five plaques along the walking path. A sign said they were the work of Danny Fitzpatrick as his Eagle Scout project in 2013.

One plaque had a reprint of a New York Times article about the panic headlined "Radio Listeners in Panic Taking War Drama as Fact."

No wonder they panicked. An actor portraying a Princeton professor said the Martians were equipped with a death ray.

"It's all too evident that their technology is far in advance of our own," the fake professor intoned.

Then there was a fake news bulletin stating that the governor had declared martial law and was sending troops to evacuate the area from Grover's Mill to Trenton.

At the end of an hour, the program was over. No one was hurt and no damage was done, unless you count the local marksman who shot up the water tower, mistaking it for a Martian spacecraft.

These days, the village has been suburbanized. Even if a Martian wanted to invade, there would be no spot big enough for his spaceship.

As for drones, I checked the skies but failed to see any.

I figured perhaps I'd have better luck when I got back to Ocean County.

It was dark by then, and as I walked up to the beach, I saw a bright white light coming off the water. By the time I got a bit closer it had disappeared.

I got talking to a guy who was looking out for drones.

The guy told me the search for drones had gotten serious. All the flights into New Jersey from Florida the night before were canceled because of the search for drones. Or so he said.

But when I bounced that off my sailing buddy, the Captain he assured me it was nonsense. The Captain recently retired as a real captain with the airlines and he happened to be in Florida waiting for a flight to Jersey. Those flights weren't canceled, he said.

But that's how rumors get started - the same way they got started back in 1938.

As I was standing there with that guy looking for drones, I realized there were a lot of mysterious lights in the sky.

Fortunately there's an app for that. I pulled out my phone and brought up the FlightRadar24 app, which gives flight information on every aircraft you can see.

A lot of things that might look like drones are just routine flights.

That's what the feds say. In a statement released at the end of the week, the FBI and other entities said,

"Historically, we have experienced cases of mistaken identity, where reported drones are, in fact, manned aircraft or facilities ... upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully. There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space."

There were no reports of drones "the size of SUVs," as the onlookers describe them. But they certainly exist, just not in our skies.

I know because I've seen them. That was in Honduras in 1985. A fellow journalist took me to an airstrip in a remote location where several drones the size of small airplanes could be seen. He said the CIA was using them to spy on the Sandinistas in nearby Nicaragua.

I have no idea whether that was true. But that airstrip was the sort of facility a foreign country would need to keep those big drones fueled for spy flights. If one existed in the U.S., there would be no way to keep it secret.

But it makes for good drama, though perhaps not as good as that produced by Orson Welles.